Pasko Sentenced to 4 Years on Treason Charge

Grigory Pasko, a military journalist who exposed nuclear waste dumping by the navy was convicted Tuesday of treason and sentenced to four years in prison, a case that critics said illustrates the risks of antagonizing the military.

The ruling capped four years of legal twists and turns for Pasko, a 39-year-old navy captain from Vladivostok who reported on environmental abuses by the Pacific Fleet.

Although the judge threw out nine counts of treason against Pasko, he was found guilty of collecting information on secret military exercises with the intention of passing it on to Japanese journalists, his lawyers said.

"I find the sentence absolutely incomprehensible," Pasko said after it was handed down.

Human rights activists, environmental groups, and members of the political elite immediately denounced the verdict as an example of how the authorities can twist innocent behavior into acts of treason against the state.

Sergei Ivanenko, deputy head of the Yabloko party, said the verdict was "a challenge to all those people who believe there should be democracy, freedom of speech in Russia, that our citizens should have full and precise information about events to do with their security, their lives and health."

Federation Council Speaker Sergei Mironov ridiculed the accusations Friday and said Pasko should ask President Vladimir Putin to pardon him. "I consider it unnecessary for him to go and prove his innocence along the circles of hell of appeals to court," Mironov said. "The world public has long figured out who is right and who is to blame here."

Pasko's lawyers and relatives said that a presidential pardon would not satisfy Pasko because it would imply that he is guilty.

Pasko's wife, Galina Morozova, said Pasko signed a request for an appeal at the guard's desk before he even left the courtroom.

But she said he has little faith that a Russian court will acquit him, and hopes eventually to be vindicated at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. The court arbitrates human rights for nations, including Russia, that are members of the Council of Europe.

Like other espionage trials in Russia, Pasko's was conducted entirely in secret, and the only detailed accounts of what transpired in the courtroom came from Pasko's lawyers and relatives. His case paralleled that of Alexander Nikitin, a retired navy captain who was charged with treason for exposing the hazards of Russian nuclear submarines. Nikitin was cleared last year after a long legal struggle.

Pasko was initially acquitted of the treason charge 2 1/2 years ago. He was then convicted on a lesser charge of misuse of office, then freed from jail under a grant of amnesty.

Pasko and the prosecutors both appealed the earlier conviction. The military division of the Supreme Court then ordered a second treason trial. Given what appeared to be the military's desire to dispose of the controversy, as well as the seeming sympathy of the judge, Pasko's supporters were optimistic that he would be found not guilty.

"We were all expecting him not just to be acquitted, but maybe even to be apologized to, because it appeared it was already a thing of the past, that it was already a relic," said Anatoly Pristavkin, chairman of the president's pardon commission, in a televised interview Tuesday night.

Pasko was working for the Pacific Fleet's newspaper Boyevaya Vakhta, or Combat Watch, when the Federal Security Service arrested him in November 1997. As a military reporter, he had collected information about nuclear contamination from decommissioned submarines and waste sites.

Accounts differ about whether he also freelanced for Japan's largest television network. Earlier reports said he received as much as $300 a month from the Japanese news media.

But Anatoly Pyshkin, one of his lawyers, said Tuesday that while Pasko talked frequently to Japanese journalists, he never received any money.

According to Pyshkin, the Federal Security Service taped Pasko's telephone conversations for about six months and arrested him as he prepared to take a trip to Japan on military matters. He spent 20 months in jail before his first acquittal.

The judge Tuesday ruled that Pasko intended to give Japanese journalists his notes on a meeting of military officers in which they described secret naval exercises, Pyshkin said. In one taped telephone call, a Japanese journalist had asked him about the exercises.

Pyshkin said that conversation was general in nature, and no Japanese journalists testified against Pasko. "There was no evidence that he had any plans of passing that information to anybody," he said.

Nikolai Patrushev, director of the security service, said the judge's verdict was "an objective one." A spokesman for the FSB said Pasko was convicted not because he was an aggressive journalist, but because he failed to protect state secrets entrusted to him as a military officer.

Outside the FSB, the verdict was widely condemned. William Schulz, director of the American branch of Amnesty International, compared Pasko to Soviet dissidents who were punished merely for exercising the right to free speech. "His prosecution has been a window into a justice system that continues to operate in secrecy and in the service of political masters rather than the law," he said.

Alexander Pikayev, a military expert with the Moscow Carnegie Center, said he believes that Pasko might have "used his professional prerogatives to gain access to some materials." But the treason allegations, he said, seem to be "complete nonsense."